The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin

That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys

In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from

The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image

In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow ...

Blake obviously knew all about the use of imagination in sexual fantasy.

In other words, human beings understand the use of imagination to raise the pressure of sexual desire, to create superheated sex. And this offers an obvious explanation for what we have called ‘the Barbusse phenomenon’—the fact that Barbusse’s hero is far less excited by a prostitute than by a glimpse up a girl’s skirt. The distant glimpse of ‘the forbidden’ produces instant ‘superheated sex’. On the other hand, the actuality of intercourse with a prostitute simply fails to focus his sexual imagination.

This notion of ‘focusing’ is obviously of central importance. It is as if the human mind is a rather inefficient microscope. If we wish to examine some tiny object, it will focus momentarily, then almost immediately slip out of focus, so we see only a blur. The first time a man makes love to a woman, his whole being seems to be concentrated on her; the fiftieth time, she is little more than a blur. But a touch of the ‘forbidden’ will instantly sharpen the focus. The Pearl contains a chapter describing a girl’s wedding night with a worn-out lecher; after flogging her and sodomising her, he has her penetrated by his servant while he sodomises the servant. We can see immediately that it is not the man’s body that has been worn out by debauchery, but his imagination. The result: his sexual desires need to be stimulated ‘into focus’ with heavy doses of ‘the forbidden’.

We can also see that this ‘blurring’ phenomenon will, sooner or later, lead to sex crime. If a man is excited by a glimpse up a strange woman’s skirt and disappointed by the actuality of sex with a woman he knows, then he may decide that the answer lies in sex with the stranger; and since, by definition, she ceases to be a stranger the moment she is willing to yield, then the logical solution would seem to be sex without her consent.

Now, oddly enough, sex crime was rare in the eighteenth century. We have already seen that, in fifteenth-century Venice, ‘sex crime’ meant adultery, fornication and homosexuality; there was apparently no sex crime in the sense that the Marquis de Sade would have understood the term. The same was, in general, true of eighteenth-century Europe. The first comprehensive account of crime in England, The Newgate Calendar (1774), contains almost no sex crime; the rare exception is a rape committed by a drunken man. The Pearl reprints an account of a trial of 1775 in which a certain Captain Powell lured Margaret Edson, a child ‘under twelve’, to his room and sodomised and raped her. Captain Powell was charged merely with common assault; evidently his crime was regarded as a misdemeanour.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.